Pacific Gas and Electric Company
American utility company
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is an American investor-owned utility (IOU). The company is headquartered at Kaiser Center, in Oakland, California. PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to 5.2 million households in the northern two-thirds of California, from Bakersfield and northern Santa Barbara County, almost to the Oregon and Nevada state lines.
Overseen by the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E is the leading subsidiary of the holding company PG&E Corporation, which has a market capitalization of $34.9 billion as of March 10, 2025. PG&E was established on October 10, 1905, from the merger and consolidation of predecessor utility companies, and by 1984 was the United States' "largest electric utility business". PG&E is one of six regulated, investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) in California; the other five are PacifiCorp, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Bear Valley Electric, and Liberty Utilities.
In 2018 and 2019, the company received widespread media notoriety when investigations by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) found the company's infrastructure primarily responsible for causing two separate devastating wildfires in California, including the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Because Californian law holds utilities financially responsible for any fires caused by their equipment, even if maintenance was properly done, the potential of $30B of liability from these fires led the company to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. The company hoped to come out of bankruptcy by June 2020, and was successful, when U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali issued the final approval of the plan for PG&E to exit bankruptcy.
History
Early history
San Francisco Gas
In the 1850s, manufactured gas was introduced to the United States for lighting.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pacific Gas and Electric Company” is american utility company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Pacific, Electric and Company, not as a finished interpretation.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1815011. VIAF identifies the subject as 147915881. The Library of Congress control number is n82018389. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 1905, 1984 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pacific Gas and Electric Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.